https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=DIUoJ0IWVB8
Bishop Aaron, one of the great hallmarks of your evangelical work has been to respond to the culture’s suspicion of morality and truth by choosing to lead with beauty. While this approach has been fruitful, there are still many who insist that beauty is not only subjective, but the most subjective of the three transcendentals, the good, the true, and the beautiful. So how can Catholics make a case for the objectivity of beauty in a culture awash with relativism and one that even seems to celebrate ugliness? Yeah, no, I get all that. And as you know, I’ve said in our postmodern culture, there’s such skepticism about the true and the good. You know, here’s what you should know, here’s how you should act. So I’ve suggested start with the third transcendental of the beautiful, which is, look, look at this beautiful thing and let it draw you into its power. But on the subjectivism thing, to me the beautiful is just as objective as the true and the good. When you see, okay, two plus two equals four, and you understand that relationship and you get it, that has a power over you. That has an objective hold on you. That’s self-evident, it seems to me. Or like when you say, here’s what Maxime L’Encolbert did at Auschwitz, and you say, by God, that was morally praiseworthy. That’s something morally right. It’s never a matter of like your private opinion, like, you know, I’m really fond of Maxime L’Encolbert. I think he’s great, but maybe you don’t, and that’s up to you. No, it has a power over you. It rearranges your subjectivity. And I think the beautiful is exactly the same thing. The truly beautiful, not just the pretty or the subjectively satisfying, but the truly beautiful, you know, the Sistine ceiling or Beethoven’s 7th Symphony or something, that, like how impossibly trivial it would be to say, listen to Beethoven’s 7th Symphony and say, I don’t like it. You know, or, it’s not really my cup of tea. And your laughter gives away the game. That’s the point, that there’s something so objectively powerful about that, that it rearranges you. You don’t sit in judgment on the beautiful. It judges you. So that’s why I would resist any attempt to subjectivize or relativize the beautiful. It has the same status as the other two transcendentals. And then it leads you, as the other two do, toward the source. So you see, this is as old as Plato, and it comes right through the Western tradition, that you see the beautiful object or person or face, and then it leads you by a steady progress, as Plato, right, outward, outward, outward, to higher, higher forms of beauty arranged hierarchically. Until you come, he says in that beautiful image, to the open sea of the beautiful itself. Well, that’s a deep instinct in the West, right? But if you subjectivize the beautiful, that whole project will not get underway. But when the truly beautiful grabs you, it starts leading you on this journey upward and outward toward God, I would say, the horizon of all beauty. So that’s why I use it, not just decoratively, like, oh, isn’t that a pretty decoration to evangelization? I use it as an essential feature of evangelization. It’s why things like Gothic cathedrals. When I was a, I was a kid, I was 29 when I went to Paris and began my studies, and when I went to Notre Dame for the first time, and it was the rose window. As a Jungian, you know, you appreciate the, I mean, all of the archetypal quality, the mandala quality of that. But what was it about that rose window that just sent me on this adventure? And I talk about rose windows in Gothic churches all the time to this day. It’s because the Platonic thing kicked in. I saw this beautiful thing, and it sent me on this trajectory. So that’s why I think it’s every bit as objective as the good and the true. I want to… Three things about that quickly. One is that I think beauty is a burning bush. It’s something that calls to us, and it’s something out of which God can speak. The next thing is maybe we shouldn’t use objective, maybe we should use transcendent. Because I think part of the reason that people object to that is because obviously beauty isn’t as easy to characterize as the existence of a simple material object. So we could say transcendent, which takes it out of the realm of the subjective and still points upward. But then I’ll make a counter proposition to that. I did a paper at Harvard with a couple of my students. We produced a measurement device, a questionnaire, as it happens, to assess people’s lifetime creative production. And then we wanted to look at the relationship between various personality traits and their intelligence and their creative ability in relationship to their lifetime creative production. And in one of the steps, we had people make a collage out of a collage kit. And then we had artists rate the collage for its aesthetic quality. And see, if you do that, so imagine you have multiple people rating the same production for beauty. Then you can calculate how tightly related the ratings are. If there’s something that you could identify reliably as beauty, then a collage that one artist rated as beautiful would be much more likely to be rated by the other artists as beautiful and vice versa. The ugly ones would fall to the bottom. And the inter-rater reliability across the judgments of beauty was extremely high. And so it’s not as high as you might say if you asked a bunch of people, is that black or white? But it was high enough so that you could extract out a single factor across the productions that you could call beauty. And so you could imagine that beauty is a category that has fairly wide boundaries, but that doesn’t mean there isn’t anything central to it. And then your claim is that it points upward, which I think is exactly right. And that goes back to Aquinas, who says the beautiful is what happens when integritas, consonancia, and claritas come together. Wholeness, harmony, and radiance. When those three things come together. And I always think of some of the sports examples, whether it’s a beautiful golf swing, or I think when someone makes a great catch in football, I say, hey, beautiful. What a beautiful catch. And someone, let’s say, not experienced with football, will say, I don’t get it. Why do you think that’s beautiful? Well, let me explain it to you. And if Aquinas is right, and James Joyce thought he was, because this is right at the heart of a portrait of the artist, is that you’re noticing those three things. You’re noticing integritas. There’s a wholeness to it. You’re noticing consonancia, which is all the elements come together harmoniously in it. Think of like a Rory McIlroy golf swing compared to mine. It’s very interesting. Because his, it’s like every element of the swing comes together with great harmony. Mine doesn’t. Mine is this herky-jerky and off, you know. So there’s a hierarchical purpose in the swing then, too, devoted towards the end. Well, then that, the last one is very cool because it’s claritas, which literally means brightness. And in some texts, Aquinas even suggests physical brightness. Like, what a beautiful watch because it’s shining, you know. But then what becomes clear in the tradition is what he really means is the claritas forme, the clarity of form. It’s the splendor of form. So you notice the concord, right, the consonancia, and then it sings to you. It’s the splendor of the form that makes you say, ah, beautiful. That would be something that would compel awe and imitation. And you could argue, I would tend to agree with this, that it’s the first of the transcendentals for that reason. Because first being has to get your attention. And only then can you reflect on it as good and true. But if first has to get your attention, you say, ah, beautiful. Then you move to the good and the true. So that’s how Aquinas accounts for the objectivity. Those three elements have to be present. So what would subjectively pretty art look like? Or the opposite of transcendent? Would that be imminent in this case? Or how would you make that? Because we have objective truth and subjective truth. That’s clear distinction. What would be the opposite of non-transcendent beauty? Maybe something that, this is Dietrich von Hildebrandt, that only appeals to your kind of emotional state of mind. It’s what he would call subjectively satisfying, as opposed to objectively valuable. There’s a shallowness to it too. That might be akin to those sorts of pop music pieces that you capture instantly, but you can only listen to like three times and you’re done with them. Compared to, well, there’s lots of music like that, compared to something like a Bach piece, for example, that you might bounce off on first contact because it’s very sophisticated, but with repeated listens, you can delve into it and then it’s inexhaustible. So the question is akin to something like what’s the difference between something that’s shallow and beautiful, or pretty, and something that’s deep and beautiful. I would say too, if something’s deep, it moves you in more dimensions simultaneously. That’s like a definition of deep. A deep story has multiple meanings. So something shallow and beautiful is exhaustible in its beauty, and something deep and beautiful isn’t. It’s inexhaustible. It rearranges your consciousness. Maybe somebody, I wrote about this many years ago, but there was an article in Rolling Stone magazine many years ago, and they asked rockers, what was the first song that rocked your world? And it was a cool way to state the question. It wasn’t what’s the first song you liked. It was what’s the first song that changed you, right? And I knew right away what my answer was. Mine is Bob Dylan’s Like a Rolling Stone, which I heard when I was 18 for the first time probably, and that’s a song that continues to rearrange me. The first song I liked was Sugar Sugar by the Archie’s. And I remember that. I love it. I was like eight years old. It’s catchy. It didn’t rearrange my consciousness. So that might be the distinction. Yeah, so deep stories, like one of the things that’s true of the biblical stories is because they are hyperlinked with other stories in the biblical corpus. So almost all their plot lines and characterizations reflect many other plot lines and characterizations. And so you can delve into them and never stop. And part of the consequence of that is that if you have an apprehension of one of the stories, and you can see how it echoes with all the other things that it includes, it does have that deep rearranging effect, right? So one of the things that deep literature does is it brings you into harmony with the spirit of the literature, right? And that’s akin to that idea that Christ was brought into harmony with the spirit of the law and the prophets. And partly as a consequence of being educated in the tradition. That wasn’t all of it, obviously. And the point you’re making is missed by a lot of biblical people today because the historical critical method came so to dominate the way we Catholics read the Bible that we missed that along with lots of other things. But you look, for example, at 1 and 2 Samuel, which I think is one of the masterpieces of the Old Testament. Whoever wrote it, we don’t know who wrote it, but whoever it was, boy, did he have access to the other texts because there’s all kinds of the hyperlink stuff all through it. Like a phrase from Genesis suddenly pops up here. A phrase from Leviticus is now over in this part of 2 Samuel. So they were well aware of that. So the book is woven together in the same way that you described something beautiful and all the parts serve the whole. That’s right. Yeah, yeah. And you know, your brain is linked like that, too. So this is actually the case that in many ways the structure of the Bible is reflective of the structure of the brain, even at a neurophysiological level. And that makes a certain amount of sense because the Bible was transmitted orally and had to arrange itself in a way that would be remembered. So you would expect a certain concordance. But the brain is arranged so that not every neuron is in contact with every other neuron, because that would just be well, that would be a total. There would be just an absolutely undifferentiated unity of structure then, but that parts of it are linked to other parts and parts are separate in a manner that optimizes both the simplicity and the complexity. And you have this exactly the same thing reflected in the biblical corpus. So which is also why it’s an inexhaustible book. Like there’s an infinite number of pathways through it. Right. Well, even that the beauty communicating depth and not being and not being exhaustible. I remember the first time I read A Brave New World by Aldous Huxley, and it was just it was it was remarkable because I was also in a Shakespeare play at the time was in college and taking a Shakespeare class. And in the story, there’s a man he’s been separated from the dystopia and he’s out in the wilderness. He’s the savage. And at one point he’s going he’s experiencing life and experiencing all these emotions. He’s experiencing suffering, experiencing his love for his mother, all these kind of he’s experienced injustice, but doesn’t have a language for it. And then he comes upon the works of Shakespeare. And it’s just like he even says in this in the in the in the book, it says that he finally had a language for the hatred he had for this kind of stepfather figure. He finally had a language for the injustice that he was going to find it and was like, yeah, because Shakespeare had that. Again, it’s transcendent. There’s a beauty there that even the savage would say this applies to my life. Multi-valent. Right. Well, one of the things I noticed in my clinical practice when I was dealing with people who had been severely traumatized, which almost inevitably meant that they had not only met with tragedy, but with malevolence, because you really need you really need to run face first into malevolence to be truly traumatized. Just tragedy won’t do it. That the conversations would immediately get so deep if we were near the core of the problem that it was almost inevitable that the language that they were using and that I was using took on like biblical overtones because that was the only language that we had at our disposal to be able to. Well, if you’re if you’ve really been hurt like if you were sexually assaulted by the uncle that was supposed to take care of you, you know that was trusted by his sister when you were four, you’ve encountered a level of malevolence that requires a language of good and evil, even even to explicate much less to understand. And, you know, one of the things you do do to people with people who have been severely traumatized is that you bring them into an advanced philosophical or even theological understanding of the relationship between good and evil, because without that, especially if sometimes people are traumatized because they’ve done malevolent things themselves. And then the only pathway forward for them at all is to develop a sophisticated formulation of good and evil. And that’s almost inevitably. In fact, it might have to be inevitably a religious formulation. You know, you could even define the religious formulation that way is that a religious formulation is a story that provides a sophisticated representation of the deepest levels of good and evil. It’s perfectly good description of religion. I think religion infuriates you because it does me when the new atheist in that kind of cavalier manner will just, you know, toss the Bible aside bronze age mythology, you know, old fashioned pre scientific nonsense. And what dangerous magic they’re dealing with there. I mean, because here’s this thing that has defined Western culture and, as you say, undergirds most of our artistic expressions and tracks with our deepest psychological aspirations and needs. What a tragedy when the Bible is trash that way. You know, it’s such a it’s a strange combination of utter oversimplified misinterpretation to read the Bible as in what would you say an archaic scientific theory because it wasn’t partly because there weren’t scientific theories 2000 years ago. We could start with that. But then, well, seriously, you know, and then and then to do to insist upon the most simplistic possible depthless misreading of the stories. But then to throw the baby out of the bathwater on the moral side is it’s surprising. You know, it’s surprising. Sam Harris, for example, you know, Sam partly insists upon his scientism, let’s say, because Sam may be somewhat uniquely among the new atheists really did wrestle with the problem with evil. And part of the reason that he wanted to ground a morality in the objective truth was because he wanted to develop a morality that was sufficiently robust that evil could be properly categorized and then pushed back against. And I think the problem with Harris’s approach is the kind of objectivity that he is attempting to base science on cannot be reconciled with morality itself. He’s got his philosophical categories mixed up badly and his project has to fail, which and I think it has.